Tuesday, October 18, 2011

AYP is to "Continuous Improvement" As Fiat Is to Yugo

The ed industry, the Oligarchs' lawyers, and the purchased politicians of DC are at it again, staying up late at night to sew together another Frankenstein monster to unleash on America's schoolchildren, parents, and teachers. One thing all self-serving parties seem to agree on is that increasing test scores should be the central component, thus giving new life to the antiquarian idiocy that makes American schools so bad, so irrelevant, so controlled by stupidity, hubris, and arrogance.

Continuous improvement (CI) is the "new" buzz word (see TQM from 40 years ago), or buzz saw, as it will be used to identify, damn, and to cut down the poorest public schools in America and convert them to segregated corporate welfare workhouses for poor children. Five percent per year, so that in ten years most of the urban poor will be entirely contained in cheap testing madrassas that emulate the total compliance lockdowns based on the KIPP model for psychological sterilization.

Call your Congressman and Senators today and tell them to start over.

As your introductory prompt observes, many
supporters of No Child Left Behind are complaining that Senator Harkin’s
proposal weakens the NCLB benchmarks by substituting “continuous
improvement” for “adequate yearly progress” towards a fixed proficiency
goal.

But as I wrote in my Economic Policy Institute blog
last week, there is less here than meets the eye. “Continuous
improvement” continues the poorly conceived NCLB approach, seeking an
unrealizable national whip that will somehow transform American schools
for the better. The effort ignores both evidence and common sense.

The proposal developed by Senate Democrats will
relieve states of having to meet federally specified achievement goals
in math and reading. Instead of requiring all students to be
“proficient” in these basic skills by 2014 (as NCLB demands), or to be
“college ready” by 2020 (as the Obama Administration proposes), the
Harkin bill will require only that schools show "continuous improvement"
for all students, and for students from low-income families, those who
don’t speak English, minority students, and students with disabilities
(see page 52 of the draft bill).

According to a report in Education Week,
“state and local officials likely will be exchanging high-fives, since
that would give them much of the flexibility they're looking for.”

They are in for a shock. “Continuous improvement”
is no more reasonable or achievable than “proficiency for all,” or
universal college readiness.

Of course, citizens should expect every public school to strive for
its peak level of performance, but some schools have much farther to go
to reach this level than others. Unlike present policy, a well-designed
accountability system could judge how far each school can and should go,
and whether it is on the right track to get there for the several
populations it may serve. In each case, this is a difficult judgment to
make, and a slogan is no substitute. In this regard, a single
one-size-fits-all metric such as “continuous improvement” is no better
than “proficiency for all.” The Broader, Bolder, Approach to Education campaign has described the outlines of a more reasonable accountability system, and a book, Grading Education, goes into more detail.

NCLB’s attempt to require all students to be proficient at a
challenging level led to the absurd result that nearly every school in
the nation was on a path to be deemed failing by the 2014 deadline. The
demand ignored an obvious reality of human nature - there is a
distribution of ability among children regardless of background, and no single standard can be challenging for children at all points in that distribution.

So why not “continuous improvement” instead? It’s a nice slogan,
borrowed from a management fad promoted by W. Edwards Deming and others
who thought this was the key to Japanese auto manufacturing success. But
while consistent attention to small improvements makes sense as a
management tool, no company has ever continuously improved, overall,
indefinitely. There are spurts of improvement, and plateaus, and then
the most successful companies fade, to be overtaken by others. No
management expert would recommend that firms be dismantled if they are
consistently profitable, but just not more profitable year after year
after year.

But continuous improvement will now, if Senate Democrats have their
way, be the trajectory for every school in the country, by law.

Today, some students and schools already perform at their peak
capacities. Many high-performing students and schools should be praised
for maintaining high levels of performance, not condemned for not
improving further.
Imagine a parent with two children of high natural
ability, one of whom is an “A” and the other a “C” student – should the
parent have equal expectations of both for improvement? I’m certain that
Sen. Harkin and his staff have not made a study of schools and students
nationwide to determine that there nowhere exist schools for whom
maintenance of quality, rather than improvement, should be our
expectation. If there are such schools, they will be the first to be
labeled failing under a continuous improvement standard.

More importantly, many “C”-performing schools and students are now
achieving at their peak capacities, in view of the external constraints
over which public education has no control. Many disadvantaged students,
and schools serving them, are low-performing not because of inadequate
school efforts, but because children come to school unable to focus
because they are hungry or suffer from untreated minor illnesses such as
asthma or tooth decay, or with inadequate early childhood literacy
preparation because their parents are poorly educated, or with
interrupted instruction because of homelessness or displacement from
housing instability, or stressed because of parental unemployment
shocks, home foreclosure, or neighborhood crime.

It is easy for Senators to issue fiats that schools serving such
children should “continuously improve” their math and reading test
scores, but many of these schools are already performing gargantuan
feats, given their social and economic contexts. Indeed, many (not all)
schools with low test scores serving disadvantaged children are having
more positive impacts on their students than typical “high-performing”
schools serving affluent children who would test well even with the
poorest instruction. A Congressional proposal that both types of schools
should “continuously improve” is based on no empirical examination of
what is possible in different types of schools, and how what is possible
might vary.

Growing economic inequality contributes in a multitude of ways to a
widening gulf between the educational outcomes of rich and poor
children. In the early 1970s, the gap between what parents in the top
and bottom quintiles spent on enrichment activities such as music
lessons, travel and summer camps was approximately $2,700 per year (in
2008 dollars). By 2005-2006, the difference had increased to $7,500.
Between birth and age 6, children from high-income families spend an
average of 1,300 more hours than children from low-income families in
"novel" places — other than at home or school, or in the care of another
parent or a day care facility. This matters, because when children are
asked to read science and social studies texts in the upper elementary
school grades, background knowledge is critical to comprehension and
academic success.

With unemployment now stuck at unacceptably high levels, especially for the parents of minority children,
the ranks of students without family-provided enrichment activities can
only grow, and the isolation and concentration of such students in
schools serving peers without such activities can also only grow.
National legislative demands that schools show “continuous improvement,”
without any amelioration of the economic hardship faced by parents,
would be laughable were it not so tragic.

And then there are the reductions in resources
available to schools, a result both of the faltering economy and
Republican attacks in many states on public education. Last month alone,
24,000 jobs were eliminated from public schools. Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute has calculated
that since the recession began in December 2007, nearly 278,000 public
school jobs have been eliminated; another 48,000 necessary to keep up
with growing enrollment were not created, for a total loss of educators
and other public school workers of 326,000. Such reductions will
continue until the economy stabilizes.

Some who are hostile to public education cheer this
development, seeing it as the shedding of inefficiency. But I’d guess
that the Senate Democrats who are drafting the ESEA re-authorization are
not among them. Sen. Harkin and his colleagues probably think that
counselors, reading specialists, librarians, classroom aides, parent
coordinators and teachers whose jobs are being cut make a positive
contribution to student achievement. Yet if so, how can Senate Democrats
demand that student achievement show “continuous improvement” when
these Senators can do nothing to prevent the resources on which that
improvement depends from being eliminated?

Some schools, of course, should improve, and
dramatically so. Some schools serving low-income students and some
schools serving affluent students operate at far below their potential.
But those that are doing as much as we should expect cannot be
distinguished from those that are doing far less, simply by looking at
student test scores or how those scores grow or don’t grow over time.
Making such distinctions requires holistic evaluation of school
curriculum, leadership, and teacher quality that is expensive, requires
trained experts, and is nested in broader community social and economic
contexts. States now have no resources or capacity to implement such
accountability systems, and proposals for a new Elementary and Secondary
Education Act are noticeably silent when it comes to addressing this
shortcoming.

If ESEA is re-authorized with a simple requirement
that all schools and students show “continuous improvement,” we’ll be
back for the next re-authorization in five years with new demands for
wholesale waivers from Congressional expectations that had no basis in
reality.

As your introductory prompt observes, many supporters of No Child Left
Behind are complaining that Senator Harkin’s proposal weakens the NCLB
benchmarks by substituting “continuous improvement” for “adequate yearly
progress” towards a fixed proficiency goal.
But as I wrote in my Economic Policy Institute blog last week, there is
less here than meets the eye. “Continuous improvement” continues the
poorly conceived NCLB approach, seeking an unrealizable national whip
that will somehow transform American schools for the better. The effort
ignores both evidence and common sense.
The proposal developed by Senate Democrats will relieve
states of having to meet federally specified achievement goals in math
and reading. Instead of requiring all students to be “proficient” in
these basic skills by 2014 (as NCLB demands), or to be “college ready”
by 2020 (as the Obama Administration proposes), ...Read More